About First-Past-the-Post (FPTP)

We inherited our first-past-the-post system from Great Britain. Basically, the way it works is, in any given riding, the candidate who receives the most votes goes on to represent the riding in parliament. Whichever party elected the most members, is typically asked to form the government. In the 1700's and 1800's, as an election system, it worked pretty well for us because like Great Britain, we only had two main political parties -- The Conservative Party, and the Liberals. The system worked great because two political parties meant two choices on the ballot, the winner of each riding would have received not only the most votes, but the majority of votes -- over 50%. This is an important point -- more people voted FOR the elected candidate than voted AGAINST him.

Things have changed a lot in Canada since 1758 when the system was first used to elect members of the Nova Scotia legislature. Issues are more complex, and our society is more diverse. Not only do we all have different opinions of how to tackle the issues, we have different opinions of which issues are most important. We now have more than two major political parties, and this is not something our election system was built for.

With so many political parties, it is very rare that the winner in any given riding has over 50% of the votes. More commonly, the winner will have received 30-40% of the votes in their riding. The other 60-70% of the votes might as well have never been cast. Yes, the winning candidate received the MOST votes, but not the majority. More people voted AGAINST the elected Candidate than voted FOR him. This disparity is found in nearly every riding.

Another consequence of our current system is the idea of "strategic" voting. This has been a growing problem in Canada. Parties will court supporters of a rival party saying, "Your party doesn't have a chance, so why not vote for us so this other party doesn't win." Canadians have been increasingly asked to vote for the lesser of two evils, rather than the party they really want to vote for.

When all these problems are added together the first-past-the-post system can give us some really wonky results.

Here are a few examples:

In the 1993 federal election, the Liberals won a majority government by winning 60% of the seats with only 40% of the votes.

The Bloc Quebecois became the official opposition winning 54 seats -- representing about 18% of the seats, with only 13% of the popular vote.

The most rediculous statistic is what happened to the Conservatives. Having won 16% of the popular vote having received about 2.2 Million votes, the PC party won just two seats.

Two. 2.2 Million voters represented in parliament by two MPs. In contrast, each Liberal MP elected represented about 32,000 votes for the Liberal Party. Quite the disparity.

With our current system, it is even possible for the party who receives the most votes to LOSE the election. This has happened at least 3 times, twice federally in 1979 and 1957 and once in BC in 1996.

In Ontario, remember Bob Rae's NDP winning a majority government in 1990? They did it with 37% of the popular vote. How is 37% a majority?

In fact we have to go all the way back to the 1930's to find an Ontario government actually elected by the majority of voters. Guess what, there were only two major parties back then.

Next... So how is MMP going to fix things?